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I’ve completed the navigation structure for the game including all the exterior locations as well as building interiors. I’ll publish the release soon for backer downloading. Timing-wise, I’m heading to Williamsburg with the family to spend a week there over Christmas vacation. This will give me an opportunity to do more interior research for more interesting (as well as accurate) descriptions. In the mean time, below is the latest game map.

The Historical Williamsburg Living Narrative depends on having an internal calendar so that days and dates may be tracked, thereby driving the narrative forward with some measure of historical accuracy. The story begins on April 20th, 1775, and what happens in the early hours of April 21st are key to the story. While Inform 7 has some built-in functionality to deal with the time of day, I haven’t found any functionality around tracking the days that pass. Specifically, I want to be assured that the day and date change when the time crosses midnight.

To deal with this, I developed a little bit of code logic to handle the passage of time from one day to the next. One of the key things I discovered about Inform 7 is that its day marker is at 4:00 AM rather than at 12:00 AM. Once that is understood, writing the code depends on a three-way conditional rather than a two-way version. The following code can be modified for your specific needs:

The code is generic, so you can alter to adjust for your needs. I’m using a version that’s only very slightly modified to meet my game needs.

If anyone has a more elegant solution (or knows of an existing Inform 7 command that might help), please drop me a line!

EDIT: I’m using time spans rather than a specific time (11:59 PM) to check the state because the player character may be asleep from before 11:59 PM to well after.

This report recently went out to all of the game Backers on Kickstarter. The actual download location is available only to the Backers.

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Greetings, Backers!

I new version is available for download at [URL HIDDEN]. Included in the .zip archive is a map of the locations.

A quick word about the map: where you see the location names highlighted in blue, the blue portions indicate a shortcut in the game navigation system (meant for speedier play testing only). For example, on the map is the “Military Encampment” location with the word “Military” in blue. When you are playing the game, type “xmilitary” at the cursor and you will be immediately taken to the Military Encampment. This will work for any of the locations in blue.

A big “thank you” goes to backer Vivianne D. for her work on the navigation code in Inform 7. Now when you type “dir” at the cursor, the game will display all possible directions (unless specifically hidden) based on room relative location definitions. Previously, I had been hand coding all those directions.

Otherwise, changes in this version are not major. Cleaned up more descriptions, added some detail, etc. Feel free to play it and let me know what you find.

In an upcoming release I will be publishing a guide that provides a listing of the possible commands.

I’ve revised the game map slightly from the last published version. In this new map, there are some altered and additional paths between locations. Also, several of the buildings (represented by red squares) have interior rooms, providing more locations for exploration. These buildings are marked with the light blue circle around them. This map is being implemented in version 11 or the test program. I’ll have that version published soon for the HWLN Kickstarter backers.

An interesting note about dealing with doors in Inform 7. I’m having to come up with unique names to identify the individual rooms/locations in the game. While it’s possible for me to use designations like “location001,” “location002,” etc. and then assign display names with the “printed name” command, that’s not as useful to me from an ease-of-review programming methodology. So I’m having to come up with some fairly lengthy yet nicely descriptive names.

All this makes me realize how many doors I have in the game. The Governor’s Palace alone is four stories (including a basement), and it has a whole lot of bedchambers that need unique names, for example.

But at least the players will be able to open and close doors in the game–at least those that aren’t locked. Or hidden.